14 Of The Best Books About Elite Universities

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“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

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Elite universities have always been fertile ground for novelists. Behind the grand buildings, prestigious names, and promises of academic excellence, these institutions can be places of intense competition, privilege, ambition, and secrecy. For some students, university presents the chance to reinvent themselves. For others, it exposes just how deeply class, wealth, and social connections can decide who prospers. That makes books about elite universities so compelling. From dark academia novels brimming with obsession and intrigue to literary stories about friendship, class, and coming of age, these books explore what happens when intelligent, ambitious people are plonked in an environment where the pressure to belong can be overwhelming. Join us at What We Reading as we delve into our favourite books set at elite universities, featuring everything from mysterious campuses and toxic friendships to academic rivalries, forbidden relationships, and scandal. Read on if you love stories about privileged people behaving badly. 

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The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Where else could we begin a list of books about elite universities than with perhaps the most defining dark academia novel of all time, The Secret History? Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. 

But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality, they slip gradually and irreversibly from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last – inexorably – into evil. 

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Check Out Our The Secret History Book Review 

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Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It charts the story of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. 

Enchanted at first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles finally comes to recognise only his spiritual and social distance from them. A story of Oxford, aristocratic privilege, friendship, wealth and decadence, Brideshead Revisited remains a classic depiction of an elite social order. 

If We Were Villains – M.L. Rio

Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail – for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago. 

As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless. 

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Check Out Our If We Were Villains Book Review 

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The Idiot – Elif Batuman

Seline, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she’s never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken with Ivan, but with each email they send, the act of writing seems to take on new and mysterious meanings. 

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside. On the way, she spends two weeks in Paris with Svetlana. Selin’s summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like The Idiot

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The Incendiaries – R.O. Kwon

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group – a secret extremist cult – founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves  North Korea and Phoebe’s Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he’s tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. 

When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe vanishes. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, seeking answers to what happened to Phoebe and if she could have been responsible for this violent act. The Incendiaries is a fractured love story and a brilliant examination of radicalised minds, and of what can happen to people who lose what they love the most. 

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars – on both sides of the Atlantic – serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this book about elite university life has helped cement Zadie Smith as a major literary talent. 

The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

It is the early 1980s, the country is in deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafes on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As she writes, Madeleine meets two very different guys: Leonard Bankhead, the charismatic loner, and her old “friend”, Mitchell Grammaticus, who returns obsessed with the notion that she is destined to be his mate. 

Over the next year, as members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides creates one of the best books about elite universities that reads like an intimate journal of our own lives.

Bunny – Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort – a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny and speak as one. 

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon – ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, the edges of reality begin to blur. Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. 

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Check Out Our Bunny Book Review 

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Real Life – Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree.  An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends – some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. 

But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defences while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost. 

The Maidens – Alex Michaelides

Edward Fosca is a murderer. Mariana is certain of it. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek Tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike – especially by members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana, who was once a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister. 

And she becomes convinced that, despite his alibi, Edward Fosca is guilty of murder. When another body is found, Mariana’s obsession with proving Fosca’s guilt spirals out of control, threatening to destroy her credibility as well as her closest relationships. But Mariana is determined to stop this killer, even if it costs her everything – including her own life. 

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Check Out Our The Maidens Book Review 

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The Art Of Fielding – Chad Harbach

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. 

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process, they forge new bonds and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and fitted with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment – to oneself and to others. 

The Cloisters – Katy Hays

When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she hopes to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a Gothic museum and garden renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art. Happy to put her troubled past behind her, Ann is happy to indulge in her new colleagues’ outlandish theories, only to learn that their fascination with fortune-telling runs deeper than academic obsession. 

And when Ann stumbles across a breakthrough in the form of a mysterious and previously believed lost deck of fifteenth-century Italian tarot cards, she finds herself at the heart of a dangerous game of power, toxic friendship, and ambition. As the game being played within the Cloisters spirals out of control, Ann must decide if the tarot cards can not only teach her about the past, but also about her future. 

The Truants – Kate Weinberg

In this seductive coming-of-age debut, Jess Walker, a young and uninitiated first-year student, falls in love with two great storytellers. One, Alec, a journalist in exile; the other, Lorna, a charismatic literature professor. Starting out under the flat grey skies of an East Anglian university campus and ending up on an idyllic Mediterranean island, The Truants is a dark academia book about a group of clever and eccentric misfits who yearn to break the rules. 

As Jess’ experience of infatuation and betrayal, disappearance and loss give way to a breathless search for the truth, she finds herself a detective in a twisted crime of the heart. Unsettling, challenging, surprisingly funny and beautifully written, The Truants is a compulsively readable debut with a twist – perfect if you’re looking for your next great university read. 

The Lessons – Naomi Alderman

Hidden away in an Oxford back street is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any but the few who possess a key to its unassuming front gate. Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose raucous trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous. 

Mark gathers around him an impressionable group of students. For a time, they live in a charmed world of learning and parties and love affairs. But university is no grounding for adult life, and when, years on, tragedy strikes, they are entirely unprepared. Universal in its themes of ambition, desire and betrayal, this spellbinding novel reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late.